One Day in English (Francesca Rendle-Short)

One day in English things did go haywire.
The teachers must have known exactly who Glory was the day she arrived. News would have travelled fast around the staffroom like the puff of cigarettes. Miss Keynote might have even announced something: I’m going to have to say something. Just watch. After all, her English syllabus was under threat. Give her to me and I’ll tell her what’s what. In any case, one afternoon after lunch, she swept into the English classroom all puff, hot and red in the face: ‘Stand up, girl.’
Glory and Lisa sat in the back row, as they always did. Their uniforms were a mess. They had been fighting each other through lunch, play fighting in the quadrangle in the sun. They had tried to be the first to rub orange quarters through the other’s hair, to see how far they could go before getting caught.
‘Stand up, girl. Do you hear me?’
There was something different about the way Miss Keynote spoke this afternoon, how her body swivelled into the room. You could almost feel the heat she was giving off. This mattered more than anything: it was about Miss Keynote herself, her sense of self and identity. Her voice shook too, as she nailed the words in place.
The air prickled with heat and Glory’s skin pricked with the sweat of her body. Everyone guessed, without it being said, which girl Miss Keynote was referring to. This was the confrontation Glory had been waiting for. But for some reason and unpremeditated at that, she let the words hang in suspension. Glory insisted, in her own silent way, that Miss Keynote reveal herself more, with more.
She did.
‘There are some parents in this school,’ Miss Keynote elaborated, ‘who think they know best how to educate young people, who are adept at the theory and practice of modern teaching, who dare to want to take our place.’ She said the word dare as she would strike a high C if singing an aria. All throat. A lifted soft palette. Quintessential control.
‘Your mother, Glory. I’m talking about your mother. She says the sort of education we are giving our pupils is defilement, do you hear?’ Miss Keynote pointed a stick of yellow chalk in Glory’s direction. She was casting out evil spirits with this move. ‘Now stand up girl when I say,’ her voice wobbled on this command, betraying something else: did Glory detect nervousness?
‘Your interfering mother thinks she knows best.’ Snap. The chalk broke in two, fell and bounced on the wooden floor between her legs like something rude. ‘She dares to interfere in Our Literature. She says it is sex-saturated. You’ve only got to read the letters to the papers—‘Mother Disgusted with School Books’, ‘Immoral Books Third-Rate Gutter Trash’, ‘Be Wary of Homosexuals’.’ Miss Keynote must have learned the lines by heart. ‘Your mother says you are not allowed to read the book Improving on the Blank Page. Dr Joy Solider says you are not allowed to meet the wicked Holden Caulfield under any circumstance. She says that these books—books on our very own reading list, do you hear?—are pornographic.’ Miss Keynote was flying now all around the room, full throttle.
When the girls heard the words sex, homosexual and pornographic, they started to snigger. Miss Keynote made a mocking face like a clown.
‘And she’s saying these things in public, on radio, for everyone to hear!’
With a flourish, she tugged at her hair and to the surprise of everyone, yanked off the black curly wig she was wearing to reveal grey wisp pulled back neatly in a maroon velvet bow.
‘What do you have to say for yourself girl? Stand up when I tell you!’
None of the girls knew Miss Keynote wore a wig. Until then they’d always seen her with it on, had always thought this teacher had luscious black hair, the sort you put into hot rollers each night. Not this smooth, straight greyness. Everyone gasped. They’d never seen her like this, in the flesh so to speak, in such a theatrical act. There was something almost obscene about it, Miss Keynote disrobing in public and mouthing those rude words at the same time. They shouldn’t be watching this sort of thing but they loved it. Their very own peepshow. It was exhilarating.
That was when Miss Keynote started to laugh. But it was a very different laughter to the sort Glory was used to. It was an us-and-her laughter kept for special occasions and the girls wanted to join in.
Poor Glory wet her pants. She was all sweat behind the knees too where the elastic garters squeezed her folds of skin. She tried standing tall—thinking, hoping and wishing this would pass quickly.
Glory couldn’t look anywhere except stare straight ahead. She was paralysed, stunned. Holden Caulfield? She didn’t really know who he was yet; she thought the reference was to some kind of car. Pornographic? That didn’t sound good.
Suddenly, Glory astonished herself. Instead of being submissive and compliant, waiting for the next command, Glory banged down the lid of her desk. It thudded into the commotion of laughter and exclamation, wood smashed against wood. MotherJoy would have been proud—wouldn’t she?—if it were true the things Miss Keynote was saying. It was like an explosion.
Everyone in the class held their breath. What would Miss Keynote say next? She stood, mid gesture, unsure how to proceed. She tipped her head as if thinking up a plan, smoothed down the line of hair on one side of her face, the maroon velvet ribbon the only extravagance. She had flawless skin, faintly red heart-shaped lips.
If this were a duel, it should be Miss Keynote’s turn to respond. But before the teacher said anything Glory pulled words from deep inside her throat and out across her tongue through nearly clenched teeth.
‘Children don’t go to school to learn to think,’ she blurted out. ‘They go to school to learn to spell, do maths.’
Glory amazed herself with this utterance. She turned pink. What made her dare challenge this particular teacher, like this? Was it with the same spirit that drove her to stand up for Jesus? There was no going back. It was that quiet, you could hear the ladies in the tuckshop faraway cleaning up. Then Miss Keynote spluttered in response: ‘Where on earth did you get that idea?’
All Glory kept thinking for the rest of the day was that perhaps, for this one crazy, heart-choking moment, she had rescued her mother. She knew how to resuscitate a body, didn’t she? She was a Bronze Medallion, owned a cute metal badge with her name engraved on the back. It was an act of allegiance, surely, not madness. A composition—an intervention—of love.